mill was perhaps the first sawmill in North America equipped with an 18-unit gang saw that could cut 7,000 feet of ’deal’ a days”. Despite these high hopes of developing a lumber export trade, and the high investments put into it, the customs records indicate that the value of the boards, planks and other sawmill products exported to the British Isles was only ever a fraction of the value of the ton- timber that was being exported in the same years.590 Rather, a more important destination for the island’s lumber products, as indicated by the customs records summary tables, was ’British North America’, presumably most going to Newfoundland — though again, in comparison with the ton-timber trade to the British Isles, in most years the amounts shipped were low.

The roles of the sawmills in forest destruction — The building of a sawmill in an area added a new threat to the trees in the area of the mill, as well as in any forested areas from which logs could be rafted or floated to the new mill. Now, the smaller and less perfect trees that the timber- hewers had rejected, and so had been left standing, could be hauled, floated or rafted to the nearest mill for sawing into boards for personal use or for a cash sale, or for barter. Thus the mills acted both to speed up forest degradation and also to render it more complete.

That at the time sawmills were viewed as leading to the acceleration of forest destruction is evident from extended comment on the matter in two letters written by the agent James Bardin Palmer to Sir George Seymour the proprietor of Lot 13 living in England. In the first letter, in 1815, Palmer wrote that he had prevented a sawmill from being erected on the Malpeque Bay side of the township ”for the purpose of endeavouring to preserve the remaining timber” on that side of the

589 Holman 1987 (see footnote 554 for a definition of ‘deals'). I

note that Henry Cundall (1854-1865) when visiting Murray Harbour in 1855, recorded in his diary that “Mr. Cambridge who formerly owned the land had mills that drove 48 saws at one time”, adding that “the man who occupies the place now has only one gmngi

59° From Lower (1973) (p. 260) it is evident that sawn lumber, especially in the form of ‘deals' only began to be imported in any quantity into the British Isles from British North America from the 1830s and 1840s by which time the island's softwood resources were in decline. A cursory examination of the island's customs records between 1822 and 1832 reveals that in each year the monetary value of the wood exported to the British Isles in the form of boards, planks or deals was generally less than 10% of the value of that exported in the form of ‘ton—timber‘. [PARO: ‘Blue Book of Statistics, CO 231 / 4 to 13; and Journal of the House of Assembly 1832, Appendix B; 1833, Appendix]

lot.591 Then a year later he expressed concern about the timber on the western shore of the township, writing that sawmills that had recently been erected at Bedeque and at Cascumpec were now putting the timber on that side under pressure from theft: ”it therefore becomes a consideration whether a proprietor should not, by erecting or encouraging a Saw Mill, endeavor to turn to present profit that which he would in all probability otherwise lose three fourth parts of”.592 It is evident that in Palmer’s view, the building of a sawmill, even as far away as Bedeque, posed a threat to the standing timber on Lot 13, as well as on all of the townships along the shores of Egmont Bay.

In 1840 when Sir George Seymour visited the township for the first time himself, the western shore of Lot 13 had still not been settled, nor had a sawmill ever been built, though as Palmer had predicted twenty-four years before, this had not prevented much of the ’pine timber’ from being ’plundered’ and rafted away along the shore, as Seymour actually observed going on during his visit. Even so, various persons, including James Yeo, were in competition to lease a sawmill site in the area — though Seymour could only see it as being used to cut "the few Pines remaining”. It is thus evident that both the landlord and his agent viewed the building of a sawmill as accelerating the harvest of valuable timber in the area, either legally or through theft.

Of course the mills themselves were not an end- point for the wood — rather they provided an efficient means of converting standing timber into a more valuable product that could be sent on to a further destination and use, and so the effects of the mills on the forest cannot be separated from the end-use to which the boards they made were put, whether it were for export or in the building of houses or ships. However, as the nineteenth century progressed, their ubiquity (the 176 mills recorded in 1861 average out at 2.6 mills per township) and their easy accessibility by the new road system, as well as the old waterways, meant that every merchantable tree on the island was liable to harvest, though by the late nineteenth century some trees might be retained at the back of the farm woodlot as a kind of bank deposit to be drawn on whenever needed, by simply hauling them to the local mill — as were the pines on his

59‘ Palmer 1815.

592 Palmer 1816.